Here is the video clip of John
F. Kennedy's Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial
Association. Scroll down for its transcript.
It follows the full transcript of
John F. Kennedy's Address to the Greater Houston
Ministerial Association, delivered at the Rice Hotel in
Houston, Texas - September 12, 1960.
Reverend Meza,
Reverend Reck,
I'm grateful for your generous
invitation to speak my views.
While the so-called religious issue is
necessarily and properly the chief topic here
tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset
that we have far more critical issues to face in
the 1960 election; the spread of Communist
influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the
coast of Florida--the humiliating treatment of
our President and Vice President by those who no
longer respect our power--the hungry children I
saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot
pay their doctor bills, the families forced to
give up their farms--an America with too many
slums, with too few schools, and too late to the
moon and outer space.
These are the real issues which should decide
this campaign. And they are not religious
issues--for war and hunger and ignorance and
despair know no religious barriers.
But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has
ever been elected President, the real issues in
this campaign have been obscured--perhaps
deliberately, in some quarters less responsible
than this. So it is apparently necessary for me
to state once again--not what kind of church I
believe in, for that should be important only to
me--but what kind of America I believe in.
I believe in an America where the separation of
church and state is absolute--where no Catholic
prelate would tell the President (should he be
Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister
would tell his parishioners for whom to
vote--where no church or church school is
granted any public funds or political
preference--and where no man is denied public
office merely because his religion differs from
the President who might appoint him or the
people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially
neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where
no public official either requests or accepts
instructions on public policy from the Pope, the
National Council of Churches or any other
ecclesiastical source--where no religious body
seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly
upon the general populace or the public acts of
its officials--and where religious liberty is so
indivisible that an act against one church is
treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against
whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in
other years it has been, and may someday be
again, a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a
Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist
preachers, for example, that helped lead to
Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today
I may be the victim. But tomorrow it may be
you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious
society is ripped at a time of great national
peril.
Finally, I believe in an America where religious
intolerance will someday end--where all men and
all churches are treated as equal--where every
man has the same right to attend or not attend
the church of his choice--where there is no
Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc
voting of any kind--and where Catholics,
Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and
pastoral level, will refrain from those
attitudes of disdain and division which have so
often marred their works in the past, and
promote instead the American ideal of
brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe.
And it represents the kind of Presidency in
which I believe--a great office that must
neither be humbled by making it the instrument
of any one religious group nor tarnished by
arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the
members of any one religious group. I believe in
a President whose religious views are his own
private affair, neither imposed by him upon the
nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a
condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President
working to subvert the first amendment's
guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our
system of checks and balances permit him to do
so--and neither do I look with favor upon those
who would work to subvert Article VI of the
Constitution by requiring a religious test--even
by indirection--for it. If they disagree with
that safeguard they should be out openly working
to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are
responsible to all groups and obligated to
none--who can attend any ceremony, service or
dinner his office may appropriately require of
him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential
oath is not limited or conditioned by any
religious oath, ritual or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in--and
this is the kind I fought for in the South
Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in
Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a
"divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in
liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal
group that threatened the "freedoms for which
our forefathers died."
And in fact this is the kind of America for
which our forefathers died--when they fled here
to escape religious test oaths that denied
office to members of less favored churches--when
they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of
Rights, and the Virginia Statute of Religious
Freedom--and when they fought at the shrine I
visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with
Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey
and Carey--but no one knows whether they were
Catholic or not. For there was no religious test
at the Alamo.
I ask you tonight to follow in that
tradition--to judge me on the basis of my record
of 14 years in Congress--on my declared stands
against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against
unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and
against any boycott of the public schools, which
I have attended myself, instead of judging me
on the basis of these pamphlets and publications
we all have seen that carefully select
quotations out of context from the statements of
Catholic church leaders, usually in other
countries, frequently in other centuries, and
always omitting, of course, the statement of the
American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed
church-state separation, and which more nearly
reflects the views of almost every American
Catholic.
I do not consider these other quotations binding
upon my public acts--why should you? But let me
say, with respect to other countries, that I am
wholly opposed to the state being used by any
religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to
compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise
of any other religion. And I hope that you and I
condemn with equal fervor those nations which
deny their Presidency to Protestants and those
which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite
the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite
the record of the Catholic Church in such
nations as Ireland and France--and the
independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and
De Gaulle.
But let me stress again that these are my
views--for contrary to common newspaper usage, I
am not the Catholic candidate for President. I
am the Democratic Party's candidate for
President who happens also to be a Catholic. I
do not speak for my church on public
matters--and the church does not speak for me.
Whatever issue may come before me as
President--on birth control, divorce,
censorship, gambling or any other subject--I
will make my decision in accordance with these
views, in accordance with what my conscience
tells me to be the national interest, and
without regard to outside religious pressures or
dictates. And no power or threat of punishment
could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come--and I do not
concede any conflict to be even remotely
possible--when my office would require me to
either violate my conscience or violate the
national interest, then I would resign the
office; and I hope any conscientious public
servant would do the same.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views
to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant
faith--nor do I intend to disavow either my
views or my church in order to win this
election.
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall
return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that
I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But
if this election is decided on the basis that 40
million Americans lost their chance of being
President on the day they were baptized, then it
is the whole nation that will be the loser, in
the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around
the world, in the eyes of history, and in the
eyes of our own people.
But if, on the other hand, I should win the
election, then I shall devote every effort of
mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the
Presidency--practically identical, I might add,
to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the
Congress. For without reservation, I can, and I
quote,
"solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute
the office of President of the United States,
and will to the best of my ability preserve,
protect, and defend the Constitution . . . so
help me God."
